On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 4:15 PM, Miles Fidelman <mfidel...@meetinghouse.net>wrote:
> Ramana Kumar wrote: > >> Dear LibrePlanet >> >> I am writing about the service that Flattr provides, and whether it can >> be done better. >> Flattr provides a way for people to make "micropayments" to each other. >> How it works: people put special links on stuff they made/own/want >> appreciated, and when people click those links, it gets recorded as "spend >> some money on this at the end of the month". Every month, the clicks are >> tallied and the amount you choose to spend is divided between the things >> you clicked on and sent to them. >> >> I see two problems with Flattr: >> >> * People must have accounts with Flattr for it to work. >> * Flattr collects fees on all transactions. >> >> >> Is it possible to let people send financial appreciation to each other >> for things on a large scale without running into those two problems? >> >> I guess BitCoins are one possible solution. >> >> Not that I really have a strong opinion on Flattr, one way or the other, > but it strikes me that if "clicks are tallied" and then funds are divided > later, SOMEBODY has to be doing the tallying, collecting funds, and > dividing them, and that there are real costs involved in doing this. > But none of those things are necessary for appreciation payments. The direct transaction method (e.g. bitcoin) over p2p has no centralised costs - they are distributed over the network and people just pay for their own participation. > > Maybe BitCoins may be a way to avoid transaction fees associated with > credit cards or paypal, but.... it seems pretty hard to avoid having some > kind of account and accounting system and having to collect some fee, > somewhere, to pay for things. > The more I learn about bitcoin (I just started learning today) the more it seems to me that that is the way to avoid having an account and a complicated accounting system. If you want a long-term account, you need to maintain it. But you're always free to create a new one-time address to send/receive money with (and that is very easy using, say, instawallet). And you manage the accounts yourself. > > It strikes me that the real questions are how to make such a mechanism > fair, trusted, as easy-to-use as possible, and keep the fees to a bare > minimum. > The fairness issue is a big one, but can mostly be sidestepped by concentrating on individual-to-individual transactions... if a group shares a receiving address and represents some unified entity to payers, then they can deal with any redistribution of funds themselves privately... > > There are models for doing so - mostly in the music industry. Check out > how ASCAP and BMI work for distributing funds received for public > performance, or for distributing funds received from jukeboxes (remember > jukeboxes?). > thanks for the pointers. > > Miles Fidelman > > > > > > > -- > In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. > In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra > > >
